The G.O.P.’s Abortion Problem

When the Tea Party first appeared as a national political force, in 2009, it was often described as libertarian—focussed mostly on lowering taxes and repealing health-care reform. Social issues, it appeared, were distinctly secondary concerns. This view now appears precisely wrong. Following their victories in the 2010 midterm elections, the Tea Partiers and their allies have proven to be preoccupied with, even obsessed by, social issues—most especially abortion.

One doesn’t hear a lot about the Tea Party these days—but that’s not because it’s gone away. Quite the opposite is the case, in fact. The goals and values of the Tea Party have been absorbed by the Republican Party at large; there is, at this point, no meaningful difference between the Tea and Republican Parties. When the Tea Party surfaced in 2009, it was basically a rebranding of what used to be called “the base” of the Republican Party. But the base now is the party.

The House of Representatives, which the Republicans have controlled since the last election, offers a useful insight into the Party’s vision on abortion. Almost the first act of the new House was to declare war on Planned Parenthood. Inspired in part by an undercover video by a conservative activist group, the House voted on February 18th to cut more than three hundred million dollars in federal funds that had gone to Planned Parenthood to provide preventative-health services, like pap tests and mammograms. (The federal government has not funded abortion itself for decades.)

The aftermath of the Planned Parenthood vote established a pattern. The Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, ignored the House vote—and even if the Senate had somehow also voted to defund these health services, President Obama would have vetoed the change. But the futility of this anti-abortion gesture only inspired the House to make more of them.

To name a few: On May 4, 2011, the House passed the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which attempted to limit insurance coverage for abortions. A few weeks later, the House passed an amendment that would bar medical training for abortion services. On October 13, 2011, the House passed the “Protect Life Act,” which would have allowed medical providers to refuse to perform abortions even when women had life-threatening medical crises.

Since none of these votes led to actual laws, it’s tempting to dismiss them all as so much legislative theatre. But it’s important to remember that the abortion-rights caucus in the Republican Party has gone the way of all of its moderates. (Such pivotal pro-choice Republicans as Lowell Weicker of Connecticut and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania are long gone—from the party and from public life. Weicker became an independent and Specter became a Democrat.) With the coming retirement of Maine’s Olympia Snowe, there will be exactly one truly pro-choice Republican in the Senate—Susan Collins, also of Maine. What passes for moderation in the Senate today is John McCain’s vote last month to allow female soldiers who’ve been raped to have their insurance cover abortions. (In the Senate Armed Services Committee, the vote was sixteen to ten to end a requirement that they pay out of their own pockets.)

Mitt Romney, as is well known, has evolved a great deal in his views on abortion. When he challenged Ted Kennedy for a Massachusetts Senate seat, in 1994, and when he ran for governor, in 2002, Romney was an enthusiastic backer of abortion rights for women. But once he started running for the Republican Presidential nomination, in 2008, he began a move to a position of Republican orthodoxy. He is now a complete convert. If he is elected President, he has made clear that he will embrace the full range of anti-abortion positions of his party, and that his judicial appointments, especially to the Supreme Court, will reflect these views, as well. Indeed, Romney is likely to be especially vigilant in following the Republican party line on abortion because he will always need to prove his conservative bona fides—and because he will rightly fear, from day one, a conservative challenger in the Republican primaries of 2016.

Abortion has been a flashpoint of American politics for so long that it can be wearying to think about it. There is always a temptation to think that it will, somehow, fade away as an issue. But it doesn’t and it hasn’t. And, in 2012, abortion remains—more than ever, in fact—the biggest and clearest difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images.

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002.